I’ve gotten some pretty good reviews in the past, and my collaboration with Scott Wolf has received more than its fair share of good ones. But this is the first time a reader has loved a book I’ve worked on and then expressed a desire for it not to be made into a film! 🙂

As always, These Dead Lands: Immolation remains on sale at Amazon in both ebook and print formats, and we hope the audio version is out by the end of the year. In the meantime, These Dead Lands: Desolation continues its journey through the, ah, birthing process. Stay tuned!

First off, a correction for a previous post on this topic. Below is one of the alternate covers that was presented of Hastings bailing out onto the train. Wolf and I discarded it, not because it’s bad or anything, but just because it wasn’t sufficiently dramatic. It is good work, though!

Now, back on topic. We already agreed upon a format, and the next revision Marc sent to us is below:

Good stuff, but the main character seems a bit out of scale, and unless the Chinook is drifting sideways, he’s kind of away from where he should be. Another guy was added, blasting away at the dead. But Wolf’s major problem with this: the stars on Old Glory aren’t right. But as you may remember from this earlier iteration, it’s generally all sorts of good.

Marc’s latest revision…

…has a different sky, a modified aspect, more guys, guns, and zombies–and oh yeah, Hastings actually kicking the head off a zombie. That was an unexpected surprise, and if he can get enough brackish gore in there, it’ll be perfect! Flag modified, our crew chief is whipping out the pistol, and some neat-o spark effects thrown in for good measure. Wolf approves, and so do I, so this is the launching pad for the final.

Now…if only I could deliver my pages so Mr. Wolf can start his slice… 😀

Just a quick ditty to provide some incubating eye candy for the next installment of the These Dead Lands series. For those of you who read These Dead Lands: Immolation, then you know that the lightfighters basically split into two groups: Captain Hastings left with the rest of the active duty troops to blaze a path to Fort Bragg, while SFC Ballantine, Guerra, Hoffman, Reader, Tharinger, and some dude named Stilley boarded a train with the dependents and the remnants of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard to roll hot to Fort Carson. Keeping with the last hook as the theme for the cover, Wolf and I went to Marc Lee once again with the following elements: give us a battle train blasting through the dead.

Example one:

Kind of cool, but there are no Little Birds in the picture as of yet (though they are coming, I’ll hasten to add–I would be remiss for not bringing the Night Stalkers of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment into the zombie apocalypse), and visually, it just didn’t have the same pop as the first cover did.

Example two:

This one had more tension to it, but again, it’s not exactly a frantic as we’d like it to be. We were beginning to realize that an element such as a train, which is generally really long on the horizontal axis, wasn’t going to work for a book cover, which is a more vertical medium. We just didn’t think we’d be able to capture everything we wanted in a way that would be as powerful as the first book’s cover art was. I mean, the above work was very close to being bang-on from my perspective, but once title graphics were laid in, they’d obscure several elements and water down the impact.

Wolf felt even more strongly that a change in direction was required, and he wanted something that more directly referenced the title–like we’re all alone in this shit, and the world’s going to hell. He was always interested in a theme with a single soldier taking on the horde; in his mind, it would be a kind of parable to Hastings’s emotional destruction over losing his family. Focusing on that–and on the fact that Chinooks rarely appear in book covers–the next design is the one we decided to go with:

Example three:

Still a bunch of work to be done here, but it kind of fits the bill. Marc will be doing the requisite body-and-fender work to bring it into shape, but if nothing else, you can hardly say it’s static and boring. 🙂